And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. His heart probably exploded during the opening song for Sesame Street.
The world of music, however, has not diminished one iota. I know a lot of folks actually liked this mad-hatter, but even his best work—that with the Jackson Five—was quite pale compared with something like Sly and the Family Stone (take special note of Fresh).
Let’s not pump him up too much. Even Amazon.com remarks on, “His incalculable musical legacy” (on their home page). Well, duh. My musical legacy is incalculable. A musical legacy is not something akin to calculation. True by default is hardly impressive.
I’m a little sad only because the prediction of the sagacious South Paw Jones (in his work “The Last Remaining Beatle”) did not come to pass:
Please don’t think me callous for speaking ill of a dead man. I said worse of him while he was alive. Much worse.
Remember: never trust a fishmonger with warm hands (where has he been keeping them?).
I had been using AVG for some time, but I have been moving over to Avast! for several reasons. AVG isn’t horrible. It’s just that I think Avast! is currently doing a better job. All of this aside I want to report a problem that came up recently in case this is useful to anyone still using AVG.
I was helping a user with a Vista machine which was running AVG for viral protection. The user was not able to download or save files. That’s not exactly true. If I saved a Web page, the main file would not save though the folder with the associated images, js files, and so forth would be saved. But the usual method of downloading an installer and saving that file to the desktop was a complete no-go.
Both Opera and Internet Explorer were able to save files as expected. And yet Firefox failed silently.
In short, Firefox behaved as though it was downloading the file correctly. But then the file wasn’t getting to the save location.
I disabled all plugins; I removed all toolbars; and I followed some interesting Mozilla hacks (here and here). All to no avail.
Since Firefox acted as though it was performing the download and save correctly I thought it must be either the firewall or the virus protection. Kill each and see which succeeds.
Needless to say, I found myself wanting to remove AVG. So I gutted AVG using Revo Uninstaller and all was well.
I loaded Avast! onto his machine and now he’s as happy as a monk in October.
Well, yeah, it’s the middle of summer but never mind that. I have been having difficulties with my Yahoo connections. I don’t use their bulky, rancid chat client. No, I use a multi-protocol chat client. My preferred client is Trillian but it doesn’t run perfectly on Wine (a Windows emulator I use in Ubuntu), so sometimes I bite the bullet and run Pidgin.
Pidgin is an open-source option for the multi-protocol chat clients. Allow me to explain that for the uninitiated in the audience. Pidgin is a program that allows one to interact within many chat venues—like Yahoo! and Windows Live and AIM—without having to run the proprietary software generously foisted on us by those behemoths. (Pidgin also publishes its source code for all to enjoy.)
Of course those behemoths would prefer each of should use their chat client, adore the ads they place before us, and sacrifice our first borns on the alters of their corporate ledgers. But I digress.
These companies sometimes make changes to the manners in which their clients interact with their servers. Standard operations for them. Plays occasional havoc for the developers of applications like Trillian and Pidgin (and Adium).
Anyway, my Pidgin hasn’t been able to consistently connect to Yahoo for some time now. After the usual research I found a couple of articles which finalized the problem (here and here). Basically, Yahoo has changed its authentication method and Pidgin hasn’t caught up quite yet.
I went ahead and installed the beta version of Trillian Astra (their newest client, currently in beta) on my Ubuntu machine using Wine, but there are problems with the visual displays within those Trillian windows (specifically the contact list) which make it effectively unusable.
Hopefully the folks at Pidgin will be able to get this sorted out soon. Alternatively, the folks at Wine might get the issues with Astra sorted out too.
It is not news to anyone that we live in a disposable society. But this wonderful lecture from TED contributor Capt. Charles Moore tells of the consequences of all this disposing (Seas of Plastic):
This unmanipulated photograph (8045) was shot in Discovery Park on .
Echoes
I used a handheld magnifying filter (6x) to bring the moss (lower right) closer. I noticed that I was able to capture reflections of the sky above in the camera-side of the filter by tilting the filter away from the plane of the lens, and I quickly incorporated this into a series of shots.
There has been no post-processing work on this image. This is as shot (just a small contrast adjustment and the addition of the border)3 June 2009.
This unmanipulated photograph (7747) was shot on .
Electric Fur
A new sushi joint here in Ballard for which I will be writing a restaurant review has this great cherry blossom tree sculpture where the cherry blossoms are represented by LED’s. I used this tree as my subject for this series of luxagraphic shots. (The orange bits are stray incandescent lamps.)
There has been no post-processing work on this image. This is as shot (just a small contrast adjustment and the addition of the border).
This has happened to me a couple of times; I reboot my server and attempt to connect Thunderbird (from my Ubuntu desktop) back to my Exchange mail server (on an SBS 2003 machine) and I get this message which ends in “error code -12263″.
Oh, what? You don’t know what 12263 is? Beats the fuck outta me.
A Google search yielded several problems which barely applied to my situation (most of them dealt with this error in relation to secure Web sites using https) and I found some information about a certificate problem (which actually dealt with Thunderbird). None of the offered solutions did me any good.
However, this was all pretty good information for me. I hopped over to my server and attempted to restart IMAP4:
Right-click on My Computer
Choose Manage from the context menu which appears
Find Services and Applications on the right
Click the + to expand Services and Applications
Locate Services below that and click on it
Right-click on Microsoft Exchange IMAP4
Choose Restart from that context menu
That failed for me too. But IMAP is dependent upon IIS Admin Service (Internet Information Services):
Start –> Programs –> Administrative Tools –> Server Management
Expand Advanced Management
Expand Internet Information Services
Right-click on [YourServerName] (local computer)
Choose All Tasks –> Restart IIS… from the context menu
So, looks like it was useful information that other folks were experiencing problems with secure sites.
I then restarted IMAP4 again just to confirm it would restart. After that I was able to connect to my various mail boxes from Thunderbird without issue.
I just updated to WordPress 2.8 (from 2.7.1). I manually downloaded the new version, deleted my old wp-includes folder (standard procedure), and copied the new folders and files into place.
Broke everything on the back end. I was able to publicly view my site. I was able to sign in to my blog. But all of the admin areas were not responding (or rather I was getting errors).
I removed all of my plugins from the plugins folder and this returned the admin functionalities. Next was the matter of determining which of my plugins were acting badly.
One at a time I copied my plugins back into my plugins folder. I had one plugin that was breaking my admin areas (you may encounter others). My Google analytics plugin would break my admin areas every time.
Fortunately I was able to find this useful solution. Essentially, you go into the plugin files (in my case the file called sem-google-analytics-admin.php) and replace all instances of is_site_admin() with is_admin() (so remove _site from each one; I had two instances).
After making that change I was able to copy analytics over again and subsequently enable the plugin.
Ah, who doesn’t love a good zombie romp? Admit it, more brains makes you all wiggly within. I know it does me.
I realize how hard it can be to locate the grain among the zombie chaff. We don’t all have the time for the thorough threshing necessary to get at the refined kernels. Thankfully a recommendation has come my way which I am able to now pass on to you. You can thank my friend Eric for bringing this to my attention.
If you were under the impression that Shaun of the Dead was the last word in zombie excitement, you have been sadly mistaken. Fido, in its own special way, takes up where Shaun left off.
You enter into a 1950’s style utopia where idealized humans live within fenced cities, protected from the wild zombies living in the outlands between the cities. However, within the cities humans have domesticated zombies. They are a bit like helper monkeys, except less ferocious thanks to their special collars which inhibit their flesh eating drives.
You think I’m kidding? This is the real deal.
Don’t waste any time. You have to see this one. Feel good movie of the year and all that fluff.
